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The Most Important Book I Read in College

Jan18

Lessons from a Bear of Very Little Brain by Sam Torode.

“In four years of college, the most important thing I did was read Winnie-the-Pooh. My saying this will surprise many of you, and it is with no small shame that I admit it. How, you ask, could I have made it through childhood, and all the way into college, without reading Winnie-the-Pooh?”

I linked to this article in Boundless last year on A.A. Milne’s birthday (b.1882), and this year I can’t resist it again. What was the most important book you read while in college? I think I read some of C.S. Lewis for the first time while in college, and if so, I would have to count those as my most important books. However, maybe I read all of C.S. Lewis while still in high school; in which case I would choose Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I stayed up until 3:00 AM to finish Les Miserables, and I had an 8:00 AM class that morning. For me, staying awake until 3:00 in the morning was an unusual occurence; my head usually hit the pillow at 10:00 PM every night. Only a very good book could keep me turning pages until the wee hours. Anyway, back to Pooh, I agree with Mr. Torode that for one who was never introduced to Pooh as a child the meeting would be a Momentous Occasion.

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926.

Brownies or Bagels?

Jan16

Today’s comic strip on our Peanuts calendar goes like this:
Lucy: “If you give a mouse a cookie” . . . Snoopy, you should write a book like that.
Snoopy, typing: IF YOU GIVE A BEAGLE A BROWNIE

Only Computer Guru Son says it should be: IF YOU GIVE A BEAGLE A BAGEL
Because it’s funnier. Snoopy

The Biscuit

Jan15

I finished reading Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand today, and I must say it’s been a good read. I really like nonfiction that tells a story, is rich in detail but doesn’t get bogged down in meaningless facts and figures. Seabiscuit, as everybody already knows because of the movie, is the story of a race horse. Most of the action takes place just before World War 2, 1936-1940. The book is about the horse, his owner, Charles Howard, his trainer, Tom Smith, and his two jockeys, George Woolf and Red Pollard. They’re a colorful lot. Seabiscuit himself is almost deformed in the knees, a horse that loves to eat and sleep–and run. One of his jockeys is blind in one eye; the other has chronic diabetes. Smith the trainer is eccentric, to say the least, and Seabiscuit’s owner is a self-made millionaire from San Francisco who started out as a bicycle repairman. All of these characters come together to create an unforgetable episode in American history. I’ve never been interested in horseracing, but I am interested in people and in history. I thought Hillenbrand captured the personalities of the people in her book (and even of the horses) and made me want to know what happened to them. What decisions did they make? How did each of their life’s “races” turn out?
Pollard, for example, was a Canadian, “an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. . . he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called ‘Old Waldo.’ The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.” Don’t you already want to know what will happen to a man like that when he meets up with Seabiscuit, a championship horse with so many quirks that only Pollard, and his friend Woolf, understand him well enough to ride him to victory?
Seabiscuit showed me a whole subculture that I knew nothing about, the horse racing world. And it was a fascinating world.
Some other worlds you may want to visit:
One Child by Torey Hayden–The world of mentally disturbed children and their teacher.
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder–The world of computer geeks and computer wizards.
Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone–The world of the Wild West; a readable history of Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California.
Small Victories by Samuel Freedman–The scary world of public high school in New York City.
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken–The world of a very special marriage.
The Conquering Family by Thomas B. Costain (and its sequels, The Three Edwards, The Magnificent Century, and The Last Plantagenets)–The world of medieval England and its royal family.

So there you have it, some of my very favorite nonfiction worlds.

Feast of the Baptism of Jesus

Jan13

Theophany: [n] a visible (but not necessarily material) manifestation of a deity to a human person

Orthodox Christians call the event of Jesus’ baptism Theophany because God appeared in Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Catholic Christians celebrate the feast to remind themselves of their own baptism and the vows made at that baptism. I thought this was a meaningful prayer for all who have been baptized into Christ, even though I hold to believers’ baptism rather than infant baptism.

Almighty, eternal God, when the Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan, you revealed him as your own beloved Son. Keep us, your children born of water and the Spirit, faithful to our calling. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

See Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-22, and John 1:39-34 for accounts of Jesus’ baptism.

Fairy Tale Man

Jan12

Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Little Red Riding Hood. Puss in Boots. Blue Beard. Hop O’My Thumb.

Choose one you love or one you’ve never read aloud, and share it with your children today in honor of Charles Perrault’s birthday. He was born in Paris in 1628 to a wealthy family, and he grew up to become a lawyer, a civil servant, and a man of letters. At age 55, he published a book of moral stories adapted from folk tales subtitled Tales of Mother Goose. The beloved tales above were included in this volume, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Beautiful picture book versions of Perrault’s fairy tales (probably adapted from the Perrault versions):
Cinderella by Marcia Brown
Cinderella by Susan Jeffers
Little Red Riding Hood by Trina Schart Hyman
Sleeping Beauty by Trina Schart Hyman
Puss in Boots by Paul Galdone

You Can’t Keep a Good Reader Down

Jan11

Classics in the Slums by Jonathan Rose is mostly about reading among the “working classes” (servants, millworkers, coalminers, etc.) in Britain in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I was pleasantly surprised to read about fellow readers who seemingly needed to read as much as I do.

The Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903 (and still a going concern today), brought university-level adult courses in literature, history, science, and economics to the mill towns. The students were intensely dedicated: they had to be, given the realities of their lives. One pottery engineer recorded that, over a 26-week period, he worked an average of 74.5 hours per week, then wrote 14 essays for his WEA course, and also delivered a total of 25 lectures to various other classes.

The WEA offered no grades, no degrees, and no vocational courses. The only motive for study was the disinterested pursuit of learning, and the students vehemently rejected any kind of occupational training.

They just loved the books.

Alan Paton’s Birthday

Jan11

This great South African author was born in 1903. He wrote Cry, the Beloved Country a novel about the tragedy of apartheid in South Africa. The book is a classic in what I would call Christian literature. I don’t know if Paton was a Christian or not, but some of his characters certainly were. The book tells the story of an Anglican priest whose son has run away and fallen into a life of crime. It’s a story of redemption, but the redemption doesn’t come easily.
Here’s some more information from last year about Paton and his writing. I highly recommend Cry the Beloved Country.

What’s Your Project?

Jan10

I found this website. It’s really just a list of projects, meaningful ways to spend time, submitted by various people. Here’s an example:

Project 98

Buy a book of perforated postcards that are of an interest to you and a friend (Beat poets, Monet paintings, etc.). Send one every day to your friend. On the back make up a story about the picture on the card, or reflect on a time when something about the picture had some relevance to the two of you (did you see the painting featured on the card together at a museum?). Push the envelope in coming up with unique interpretations of the picture and its meaning for the two of you.

Do this until you have sent all the cards.

Michael K. Gause
Minneapolis, MN

I think I’ll try it.

Who Is It?

Jan6

1. He was born on January 6, 1878.
2. He quit school after the eighth grade and worked for the next ten years at a variety of jobs: delivering milk, harvesting ice, bricklaying, threshing wheat in Kansas, and shining shoes.
3. He then became a hobo and then a soldier.
4. He finally went to college and became a writer, a socialist, and a labor organizer.
5. He won two Pulitzer Prizes–one for his biography and one for his poetry.
6. He raised goats and collected books.
7. He wrote this poem, a favorite of mine and of my children:

Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your
head.
Arithmetic tells you how many you lose or win if you know how
many you had before you lost or won.
Arithmetic is seven eleven all good children go to heaven — or five
six bundle of sticks.
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand
to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and
you can look out of the window and see the blue sky — or the
answer is wrong and you have to start all over and try again
and see how it comes out this time.
If you take a number and double it and double it again and then
double it a few more times, the number gets bigger and bigger
and goes higher and higher and only arithmetic can tell you
what the number is when you decide to quit doubling.
Arithmetic is where you have to multiply — and you carry the
multiplication table in your head and hope you won’t lose it.
If you have two animal crackers, one good and one bad, and you
eat one and a striped zebra with streaks all over him eats the
other, how many animal crackers will you have if somebody
offers you five six seven and you say No no no and you say
Nay nay nay and you say Nix nix nix?
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she
gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is
better in arithmetic, you or your mother?

Who is it?